I use a lot of Java applets (jmol, but without the plug-in) in my organic chemistry course. Because you can no longer use relative links, every time I need to post an applet, I have to upload the entire set of files for the applet to run, and then "set main file." (Setting main file to another resource does not work.) Before I would have uploaded this once. Hence, I suspect it is consuming considerably more space, not less, as one might think.

One of the reasons (I think) to switch to repositories was such that you didn't have to upload things over and over; and to save space since you could link to a previous version of a file. This clearly doesn't accomplish that, and wouldn't in any mini-website for which you want to post different parts of it as different resources. You would have to post the entire mini-website every time if you want to have different start points for different resources.

I'm not sure whether we mean the same thing. You say, Moodle 2 does not allow relative links, but Moodle 1.9 did not allow them either. In the case of mini-sites, I always upload the full set of HTML files and linked the index page through Moodle.

The original question is equivalent to asking what happens if you have the same, large mini-website but you want to have different start points as different resources. I thought you had to upload the same set of HTML files multiple times, setting one file as the main file. The set of folders I upload is 21 MB each time I upload it, and is horribly space consumptive.

But what you can do is upload the mini-HTML as one resource, and then post a URL for different pages; since the relative files work there, you don't have to upload the same thing over and over again.

When you say that this is 'horribly space consumptive', you don't seem to be taking into account the fact that Moodle 2 stores identical files only once. If you upload the same file 100 times, even if you give it a different name every time, Moodle will detect that the contents are the same and only store the file once on the server (with multiple references to it in the database).